Archives for June 2010

In the life of rural America, rocky outcrops include the possibility of a hole.

Peter Sutherland is drawn to places that are filler on the country’s psychic map, places where time lags between meals, and nothing in particular looms on the horizon. What drew him to the hole above was not the possibility of a bear within but the youth without. They decorated the edge of the dark as a homage.

Boredom interests him. Sutherland makes art of odd games, twists of light, lying around. Ordinary burdens and accidental beauties pause for him to take their picture. About his exhibit last year at the ATM Gallery, Blame It On The Dog, Roberta Smith wrote:

Mr. Sutherland is something of a multitasker. In addition to writing
rather well (in the show’s small catalog), he is also a filmmaker.
Whatever he does seems to celebrate the potential for inspiration in
even the most pedestrian and barren facts of American life. Every
instant is a possible image; every image a likely story.

The last image, of the artist balancing a knife on his palm, is a still from a video. It’s the first thing you see upon entering Lawrimore Project. If you’re not planning to enter Lawrimore Project, you can see the video online by going to Sutherland’s Website, here, and clicking the last word of his essay, which is joy.

Through June 26.

If painting is what John Russell called a “vegetable construct that changes in time,” there’s no reason a painter can’t accelerate the progress. Before Plank Lean Painting left Andrew Dadson‘s studio in Vancouver B.C., he retracted it.

Andrew Dadson Plank Lean Painting #2, 2010.
Oil on canvas.
60 x 60 x 10 inches

Plank Lean Painting, detail

What symphonies of old-time push and pull are buried underneath the black? Leftover colors gather at the painting’s edge like clues at a crime scene. And this is the truth about painting. Dadson’s attempt to kill it gave it license to rise again in another form, from bloom to blight, channeling Rothko.

Voter’s Ink, 2008
Iraqi voter ink on canvas
framed with UV Plex
42 x 32 inches (reversible vertically)

Making a painting from Iraqi voter ink embraces accelerated change.  The piece will continue to develop in the light, losing purple and gaining gold, its specifics lost in an atmosphere over which the artist has no control. For someone who is not primarily a painter, his contributions to a medium that only momentarily has his attention are extraordinary.

Through June 26 at Lawrimore Project. Jessica Powers on Dadson here.

Say you are represented by the most innovative gallery space in the Northwest – simultaneously a  warehouse, salon, white cube and video theater. It’s your turn. You can do whatever you want there, take as much space as you want. If you’re Matt Browning, you want to burrow into the furthest corner of the deepest back space (in the salon), wall off the fireplace and use its top as a shelf for a miniature forest of palm-sized, reconstituted  trees whittled into cone-like wedges full of boiled pine sap. Other than that, the room is empty.

In the middle of the worst environmental disaster since the Ice Age, Browning’s modesty is appealing. Appealing and deceptive. It takes a major artist to pull off this kind of scale shift.

And down in lovely muck I’ve lain,

Happy till I woke again.

Then I saw the morning sky:

Heigho, the tale was all a lie;

The world, it was the old world yet,

I was I, my things were wet,

And nothing now remained to do

But begin the game anew.

A. E. Housman

But begin the game anew…too little, too late, but imperative nonetheless.

Browning, detail:

Titled Tradition as Adapative Strategy, Browning’s foray into the world of back-porch whittlers builds the conceptual from a foundation of masculine craft. Each piece comes from one block of wood he carved into a cone suspended from a brace. He poured the pitch into the cones, which are also funnels.

And  time machines. Like oil in water, the pitch will continue to move at its own leisurely imperatives. (See Thomas Parnell’s Pitch Drop Experiment at the University of Queensland.)

Browning conceived of his show before the Gulf of Mexico promised to become a dead zone, but surely he saw it coming. A consumer society consumes itself. After eight deregulated years of the Bush administration, the self-consumption is an orgy. Browning’s adaptive strategy offers no solutions, save for the most basic.

In the face of ruin, the handy man make something. He jerry-rigs a repair and failing that,  fashions a memorial. Drawing on skills passed down from generations, he speaks to future generations with his actions: Take up your bed and walk, or, as Fergus said in The Crying Game, pick up your teeth with broken fingers.

Jen Graves on Matt Browning here. Through June 26.

Seattle artists Jaq Chartier and Dirk Park, the masterminds behind Aqua Art Miami, have booked the hotel on Ocean Avenue, the scene of their early success, and dispensed with the warehouse in Wynwood that never really caught on.

Chartier:

It’s what all the galleries seemed to prefer after many conversations, and the energy is already way better than it’s been for a long time.

Ben Beres, Seattle artist and part of the art team SuttonBeresCuller, catnaps in 2005 on the second floor of the Aqua Hotel during Basel/Miami. Adam L. Weintraub photo, Seattle PI

Céleste Boursier-Mougenot

detail (2009)
color photograph mounted on aluminum and plexiglass
43 5/8 x 43 5/8 in. (110.8 x 110.8 cm)

Ron Tran‘s pigeons (The Peckers, 2004) are better musicians, but they have backup on piano.

The Peckers in concert here. It’s a NYT’s video and you have to watch a short ad first, but it’s well worth it.  This piece was featured in Michael Darling’s Thermostat: Video and the Pacific Northwest at the Seattle Art Museum in 2008.

In what used to be the Henry Galllery’s gift shop but is now a gallery behind the reception desk is Céleste Boursier-Mougenot‘s wading pool for porcelain.

Céleste Boursier-Mougeno (France, b. 1961) Untitled (Series #2). 1999
Inflatable plastic pool, porcelain bowls, glass snifters, pump, immersion heaters, water, and Clorox Henry Art Gallery, gift of Kate Elliott


The sound’s the thing, a random clack-clack fused with bells. Reminds me of a fragment of a F. R. Higgins’ poem about Jezebel, whom the dogs of the street eat. “Though her ghost lacks a back, there’s music in the old bones yet.”

Some exhibits are so earnest and academic, so overcooked and underfed that when they are taken seriously by excellent curators, dealers and critics, I experience them as if they were tidal waves surging from a sewer. In their stink, I am momentarily but deeply sick of art.

A prime example of this sort of thing is currently at James Harris: Robert Davis and Michael Langlois‘ Into the Void: The Battle of the Martyr as Told by Ingres.

James Harris:

Robert Davis and Michael Langlois are collaborators who make paintings together, redefining the conventional notion that paintings are made by a single artist and embody a singular essence or “hand.” They met while at the School of the Art Institute and have worked together since 1997, each taking an equal role in developing ideas, choosing subjects, and executing the works.

Davis & Langlois:

For us, representational painting always includes a deferred
relationship to the painting’s event. In this sense, we see our
paintings as historical and symmetrical to our own relationship to the
past-defined by an ever-renewing dynamic between memory, its
representation and the synchronicity brought about in the object
itself. Our vocabulary is derived from popular and sub cultures and
while we use the oldest trick in the book (mimesis), we are committed
to making classical techniques viable options in contemporary art.

Both paragraphs are Grade A Prime nonsense, but hey, nobody’s perfect. The exhibit also comes wrapped in a ridiculous narrative: a resurrected Ingres narrates the tale of a 15-year-old Palestinian-American girl thinking of Chief Seattle when he was forced out of his land, text translated into Soundgarden lyrics translated into Arabic. Again, bad but not fatal.

What’s fatal is the work itself, the painting. It’s gutless, with all the gears of its machinery clogged and dry.

The Resurrection, 2009
Oil on canvas
40 ” x 50″

These people are going to make “classical techniques viable options”? Ingres would have laughed them out of his studio. They’re going for the silky sublime, of which the 19th Century French NeoClassicist was master. What they deliver is competent sign painting. From a distance and viewed from a moving car, their mimesis might pass muster.

Iman, 2009
Oil on canvas
66″ x 72″

In a gallery, a good gallery, it’s a disgrace. Painting is not limping along, needing an assist from whatever rotten crutch is on offer. Painting needs Davis & Langlois like a fish needs a bicycle.

Into the Void, 2009
Oil on canvas
96 ” x 104″

The core of this exhibit made a previous appearance at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (September 5 – 28, 2009). That’s a big venue for a trifling product.

How Can You Buy Or Sell the Sky, 2009-10
Watercolor and silver paint on wall
Dimensions site specific

Through June 19.

The room around you is a house. Your house is your body bubble. Invaded by misfortune,  fortified by paranoia, your house is your thickest hide. It’s shaped in your image, if you have an image and aren’t just living there, having nowhere else to go.

Whiting Tennis MASTODON, 2010
Acrylic and collage on canvas
46 x 65 inches

Whiting Tennis builds and/or paints shelters that are spiritual containers for the thing contained. Their oddity derives from the inability of their inhabitants to focus their projections. His current exhibit at Greg Kucera Gallery is called Walleyed, used in a sense that moves beyond sight into essence.

TRICLOPS, 2010
Paint on plywood
114 x 55 x 55 inches

STILL LIFE WITH BIRDBATH, 2010
Oil on canvas
30 x 24 inches

BROWN SHELF, 2010
Oil on cardboard collage
29 x 43 x 1.75 inches

Through June 26.